More Than 2,300 Auburn Students Have Taken Gym Class Inside a CrossFit Box

• CrossFit on the Plains in Auburn, Alabama, has hosted a for-credit Auburn University physical education course every semester from spring 2011 on, and about 2,340 students have now taken it.
• The 15-week class meets three days a week for 50 minutes and ends with an open-note exam on CrossFit methodology and basic exercise physiology.
• Owner Dalton Ard estimates one in five students retakes the course or joins the gym, and two of his recent coaches first walked in as students.

The PE Class Where College Kids Learn to Squat, Row and Scale for a Grade

One student wanted to quit after his first workout. The clock ran out on him before he finished, and he told coach Nathan Steele he was done. Steele asked for five more classes before the student made up his mind. The student stayed through the end of the semester, then bought a membership.

He had signed up for a college course. Auburn University has offered a CrossFit physical education class for credit at CrossFit on the Plains, an affiliate gym in Auburn, Alabama, every semester going back to spring 2011. About 2,340 students have now come through it, according to a September 24 report by The Barbell Spin. Around 75 new students enroll each term across five sections.

For a sport that still struggles to convince beginners the gym door is open to them, Auburn has built something rare: a steady pipeline of 18- to 22-year-olds who learn to deadlift, row and pace a workout with a coach watching, and who get graded on showing up.

How a Line in a Business Plan Became a University Course

Dalton Ard opened CrossFit on the Plains at the start of the fall 2010 semester with the university class already written into his business plan. He got the idea from a CrossFit Journal story about an affiliate owner who taught students on a college campus. Ard flipped one detail. The students would come to his gym.

A member working on a doctorate passed the pitch to the head of Auburn’s kinesiology department. Within days Ard sat in front of a department group. The university approved a trial for spring 2011 with 12 seats. Ten students enrolled.

Auburn renewed the contract after that first semester and added a second section. By 2014 the program had reached five sections, the size it holds today. The class sits in the course catalog next to golf, tennis, bowling, scuba, martial arts and yoga, all taught by contract instructors.

Ard wanted the class in his building, with his equipment and his music. Holding it at the gym lets his coaches “train them exactly how we would like, with our equipment, in an atmosphere that creates the most energy,” he told The Barbell Spin. Students drop bumper plates, hear the speakers turned up, and train the way paying members do.

The split of duties is simple. Auburn runs the course listing, enrollment and the contract-instructor agreements. The gym writes the curriculum, supplies the space and gear, and carries the insurance. The coaches work for the gym and draw their pay from it. Before each academic year the university asks Ard to set a per-student fee, and the gym collects it from students at the start of the term.

What 43 Class Days Look Like

The course runs about 15 weeks, or 43 class days. Sections meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday for 50 minutes. A typical class follows the same rhythm:

• A workout brief, where coaches explain the movements, often with a demo video, and show students how to scale the day’s workout to their level
• A warm-up that drills positions and movement patterns
• The workout itself, with coaches on the floor
• A cooldown, which gives coaches time to answer questions and get to know each student

Students also get a nutrition guide. At the end of the term they sit an open-note final exam on CrossFit methodology and basic exercise physiology, so the grade covers the why of training along with the work.

Steele, the gym’s general manager, teaches the science through movement first and theory second. Students might do a short all-out effort, a five-minute workout and a 20-minute workout, then compare how each one felt in their lungs and legs. He links lifts together. The hinge in a Romanian deadlift carries into a hang power clean. The leg drive and pull of a rowing stroke use the same pattern.

Benchmark workouts double as pacing lessons. In “Cindy,” a 20-minute test of pull-ups, push-ups and air squats, students who sprint the first rounds find out fast why their coaches told them to break up reps early. Students who can’t yet do a pull-up use ring rows. Push-ups from the knees keep form clean. Coaches want each student in a version of the workout that fits them that day.

“My job as a coach is to help them feel comfortable first and then teach them where they can start pushing themselves,” Steele said. “I want them to trust me as their coach and understand that I’m there to help them get better and improve, not just to make them suffer through a workout.”

Who Walks In, and Who Stays

In the program’s early years, one or two students per semester had tried CrossFit before. Today more than half arrive with some CrossFit or strength-training background. Each term still brings true beginners. Steele says some of them worry lifting will make them bulky, and former high school athletes tend to show up confident and leave the first week “humbled a little bit.”

One current student had taken other high-intensity interval classes and expected more of the same. She found coaches drilling technique instead. “CrossFit places a heavy emphasis on completing movements with proper form, which is not something I had anticipated going into it,” she said. She told The Barbell Spin that walking into a regular class full of members who already knew the lingo and the loads would have scared her off. A room of fellow beginners made it easy to ask questions. She is back for a second semester and brought two friends.

A former student who later joined the gym said the grade kept her honest. Attendance counted, so she showed up on days she would have skipped. What stuck after the semester was social. “It’s just an hour of my day, and it gets me moving my body and keeping it healthy, all while being around an amazing community,” she said. Her biggest lesson was that a gym “isn’t as scary as some people think.”

Ard estimates about one in five students either retakes the class or becomes a member. Students can earn credit only once, and some enroll again anyway. The record is four semesters. The class has also become a hiring channel. A coach who left for a full-time job after graduation first came in through the course, and the coach Ard hired to replace him followed the same route.

“Being able to properly introduce someone to CrossFit and make fitness a priority in their life is one of the best parts of this whole program,” Ard said.

A Blueprint for Gyms in Other College Towns

Ard’s case for the class leans on the college calendar. Lectures, study sessions, Greek life, clubs, intramurals and game days fill a student’s week, and campus dining halls do little to help. A class that requires three workouts a week hands students a routine most of them would struggle to build alone. Some enrollees are children of current or former members. Others hear about it from a sibling or roommate. The gym now wants to reach more freshmen and sophomores, who have time to repeat the class or join before they graduate.

For an affiliate owner in another college town, Auburn offers a template. Start with the physical education or kinesiology department. Learn how that school hires contract instructors. Explain what students will learn along with the workouts they will do, and spell out who covers staff, equipment, insurance, grading and fees.

Affiliates across the country run their own outreach, from gyms coaching adaptive athletes such as Philadelphia’s two-time adaptive CrossFit Games champion Lauren Taylor to boxes that train veterans and first responders. Few of them have a university registrar sending new members through the door each semester.

For a student thinking about the class, the offer is concrete: 43 coached sessions, a grade that rewards attendance, and a room full of people starting from the same place. Fifteen years after ten students took a chance on a trial section, Ard’s coaches still meet a new group of nervous beginners each August and January, and about one in five of them keeps coming back after the credit is on the transcript.